This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The only hope for Israel was in something eroding the twin forces of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism that have defined Arab Muslim identity since the 1950s. The distinct problem for Israel was and is that the erosion of one is not enough. Both ethnotribal identity, socialist or not, and religious identity in the region are fully hostile to Israel, as increasingly is liberal modernity. There is no off-ramp except the vague hope that maybe eventually people are rich and secular enough that they stop caring. But plenty of rich and secular western Zoomers on college campuses seem to care very much indeed, so even that seems questionable.
Israel was just founded in a bad place. Its destruction is not inevitable, especially because AGI/ASI will upend global politics in such dramatic ways that we can’t really predict anything more than 20 years away. But the most viable location for it was probably in some of the depopulated formerly German parts of Eastern Europe, now no longer claimed by Germany since reunification and never really substantially Polish (pre-1945) either.
One can imagine a kind of smaller, Ashkenazi post-shtetl state in a corner of what is now Western Poland. I think that would probably have been fine. The Germans and Poles would both have claimed it, but the tension between them would have likely kept it independent. Still, the iron curtain, the broader aftermath of the war, and the insistence of the great majority of Zionists that it had to be Israel prevented it from ever being anywhere else.
In the end, I suspect the state of Israel will be another tragic story in the annals of Jewish history. It will be no great new beginning, but it will also be no final end, and its decline (destruction or not) will represent the end of the age of Ashkenazi Jewish overcontribution to modernity that began with the Haskalah.
I keep telling all my Israeli buddies that they should just Migrant Fleet around the world for 2 years. Bury Jerusalem in a giant gelatinous cube to preserve it, then fuck off on a 2 year booze cruise (after buying shares in Carnival Cruise of course). They can return to the holy land thoroughly depopulated after the Arabs have killed each other endlessly to claim the spoils, and its not like the land itself there was worth that much to begin with.
Rising temperatures and water shortages might do that work first. Israel is the only nation in the region with the type of HC to deal with these issues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This has been my stance on Israel for the entire time I’ve been politically aware. I almost wish there had been some sort of Ashkenazi European equivalent of Joseph Smith, who could have come up with some compelling theological innovation to get some number of Jews to reconceptualize Eastern Europe as the actual (or, at least, divinely ordained) site of the Promised Land.
There’s a tinfoil hat theory on the counter-semitic hard right about Khazaria, the supposed medieval Jewish nation which existed somewhere in modern Ukraine; the conspiracy theory is that (((they))) engineered the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to depopulate that part of Ukraine in order to make it a viable alternative homeland should Israel fall. Maybe the hypothetical Jewish Joseph Smith could have built something around a mythical vision of Khazaria.
I’m not sure about this. Now, my stance toward Jews is that, in the fullness of time, I would like them to lose their distinctive identity — built on a sense of separateness and specialness — and to become absorbed into a conglomerated elite world culture. For Jews to just become one of the constituent ancestries of the new dominant world ethnicity which is only just beginning to be forged. This will require the end of Israel as a sovereign entity, but I don’t think it will mean a decline in the overperformance of individuals with Ashkenazi ancestry. (If anything, it will help spread Ashkenazi ancestry even wider, albeit in an admittedly diluted form.)
In five hundred years, I can imagine the esoteric right-wing androids will promulgate knowledge of haplogroups, treating Ashkenazi ancestry as a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek badge of honor, the way right-wingers crow about their R1b ancestry nowadays.
More options
Context Copy link
Uhh... I think this cold argument completely ignores the religious aspect of where Israel was chosen to be? No, random parts of Germany would not be the "most viable," they literally wouldn't even matter. Jewish people wanted a state in the Holy Land, it's unthinkable that the project could've worked to gather so may Jews into a nation again anywhere else imo.
The Zionists in that timeframe were overwhelmingly secular and laid claim to the territory on secular grounds - like the interwar Polish claim to what later became the ‘recovered territories,’ but somehow even more retarded.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link